What Do METALS Students Say About METALS?
“In just one year, the METALS program helped me learn how to build intelligent tutors, design educational games and collaborate with real classrooms. In my first semester, I dove into impactful projects for my courses, including building an adaptive ASL tutor for Personalized Online Learning and co-designing a Duolingo extension with high school students for Learning Media Design. I wrapped up the semester by presenting my paper at an international conference. In the spring, my capstone team and I built an AI-powered educational game to teach essential entrepreneurial skills for youth in India, and my team’s murder mystery game about AI biases from Educational Game Design is set to be demoed at CHI PLAY 2025. I am leaving CMU with more than a degree—I’m leaving with stories, skills and a renewed purpose to create learning experiences that can make a real impact.” – Pragati Maheshwary (METALS 2025), PhD Candidate in Learning Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Being in the METALS program has been a huge source of personal growth for me. I have learned that a lot of our classes are hands-on, leading to collaborative projects that can become published research. To me, that is a testament to how the program helps you turn your ideas into tangible accomplishments. I would also highly recommend taking advantage of all the opportunities available—especially joining research groups early on. It is a great way to build valuable connections with people who share your interests and can help you grow professionally. A project from my “Tools for Online Learning” class is a perfect example; it evolved into a demo paper and a workshop paper I presented at the AIED conference, and the program even provided funding for me to attend.” – Cindy Ping (METALS 2025), Research Associate at Carnegie Mellon University
“The METALS program has really pushed my personal and academic growth. My biggest piece of advice is to explore classes outside of your comfort zone, which the program makes easy since it’s housed within the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and the School of Computer Science at CMU. This gives us access to so many different courses, from psychology to computer science. My own experience shows just how much you can grow here. A project I worked on for the “Tools for Online Learning” course turned into a paper called ““PromptPair: A Personalized Multi-Agent Learning System for Developing Prompt Engineering Literacy in K-12 Educators,” which became my very first in-person academic presentation at the AIED conference. It’s a great example of how the program turns classwork into incredible, real-world research opportunities.” – Michael Sutton (METALS 2025), Master Student in Engineering and Public Policy @ Carnegie Mellon University
“The METALS program was an invaluable experience that directly prepared me for my career in HCI/AIED research. Through independent studies, I collaborated with top faculty, resulting in two full papers at AIED 2025 and an interactive event. This work provided me with hands-on experience in conducting learner studies on a scale and allowed me to customize my curriculum to match my career goals. Equally valuable was my 7-month Capstone Project with Varsity Tutors, where I served as the development lead. This experience complemented my academic research by offering an industry perspective on applying AI and other emerging tools in real-world contexts. My time in METALS has been instrumental in helping me achieve my goals and securing my new role as a Research Associate at HCII.” – Chloe Zhao (METALS 2025), Research Associate at Carnegie Mellon University
“I thought my capstone experience would be like any other project with all work ending up in a presentation or report that no one remembers or benefits from except for the members themselves. It was a very new experience for me to see my regular schoolwork being groundbreaking work for an actual company (or even the U.S. Government).” – Kathy Yu, (METALS 2016), Solutions Engineer at Splunk
“I think that learning engineers and learning designers are really one of the up-and-coming professions. Pittsburgh is also an ideal place to be if you’re interested in educational technologies.” –
Mark Potter, (METALS 2014),
Senior Product Owner — Platform Experiences at McGraw Hill